About
Sleepwalk is a high-speed and darkly comic road trip through a near-future America with a bighearted mercenary, from National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author Dan Chaon.
Will Bear is fifty years old, and he's been living off the grid for thirty years. He's never had a real job, never paid taxes, never been in a committed relationship. A good-natured mercenary with a complicated and lonely past and an LSD micro-dosing problem, he spends his time driving across a fractured America beset with problems both new and old, running sometimes shady, often dangerous errands for a powerful and ruthless man he's never troubled himself to learn too much about. He has lots of connections, but no true ties. His longest relationships are with an old rescue dog with post-traumatic stress and a childhood friend as deeply entrenched in the underworld as he is, whom, lately, he's less and less sure he can trust. Will Bear isn't his real name, of course, but one of the countless aliases necessary in his line of work.
Out of the blue, one of his many burner phones heralds a call from a twenty-year-old woman claiming to be his biological daughter, Cammie. She says she's the product of one of his long-ago sperm donations; he's half certain she's a robot. She needs his help. She's entrenched in a widespread and nefarious plot involving the very people Will works for, and continuing to have any contact with her increasingly blurs the line between the people Will is running errands for and the people he's running from.
With his signature blend of haunting emotional realism and fast-paced intrigue, Chaon populates the vividly imagined fictional America he's created with characters who ring all too true. Gazing both back to the past and forward to an inevitable-enough seeming future, Sleepwalk examines where we've been and where we're going as both a country and a species, and the curses and joys of being human that will never change, no matter how far we travel to run from them or how cleverly we hide.
Will Bear is fifty years old, and he's been living off the grid for thirty years. He's never had a real job, never paid taxes, never been in a committed relationship. A good-natured mercenary with a complicated and lonely past and an LSD micro-dosing problem, he spends his time driving across a fractured America beset with problems both new and old, running sometimes shady, often dangerous errands for a powerful and ruthless man he's never troubled himself to learn too much about. He has lots of connections, but no true ties. His longest relationships are with an old rescue dog with post-traumatic stress and a childhood friend as deeply entrenched in the underworld as he is, whom, lately, he's less and less sure he can trust. Will Bear isn't his real name, of course, but one of the countless aliases necessary in his line of work.
Out of the blue, one of his many burner phones heralds a call from a twenty-year-old woman claiming to be his biological daughter, Cammie. She says she's the product of one of his long-ago sperm donations; he's half certain she's a robot. She needs his help. She's entrenched in a widespread and nefarious plot involving the very people Will works for, and continuing to have any contact with her increasingly blurs the line between the people Will is running errands for and the people he's running from.
With his signature blend of haunting emotional realism and fast-paced intrigue, Chaon populates the vividly imagined fictional America he's created with characters who ring all too true. Gazing both back to the past and forward to an inevitable-enough seeming future, Sleepwalk examines where we've been and where we're going as both a country and a species, and the curses and joys of being human that will never change, no matter how far we travel to run from them or how cleverly we hide.